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Few areas have experienced the devastation of a hurricane more than Florida where DTS is headquartered. Annual hurricane preparations begin in June and many residents remain on high alert until late October, when water temperatures cool and no longer propel storm development. We stock up on bottled water, flashlights, batteries and canned food, keep an eye on the tropics and fill up our gas tanks at any sign of a potential threat. These things are a way of life for many of us, and are not taken for granted.

This August, it wasn’t Florida in the path of destruction. Residents of the Sunshine State watched in horror last week as the Texas coastal bend braced for an impact that was, in many ways, reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. With the second largest US population, Texas was not able to organize a mass evacuation and those who chose to remain in their homes were urged to write their name and social security number on their forearm for first responder identification. As we tuned in across the gulf for the weather updates, storm coverage and reports of flooding, we empathized with our western neighbors.

“We had two of our data collection vans in Houston last week that had to be diverted to Arlington to avoid the storm,” said Rafael Rivera, DTS Director of Asset Management Technologies. “We have clients across the country, but a lot of them are in Texas. It’s scary and sad to see them in this situation.”

From our office in Orlando, Data Transfer Solutions employees wanted to help. Our clients, our friends, our co-workers and our families are in Texas. So we decided to do something.

Little bags with a Big Impact

On Thursday, August 31, local humanitarian and environmental group Clean the World delivered essential daily hygiene items to our office, greeted by staff members who were eager to help in some way. These items were assembled by staff into kits that also contained a handwritten message of hope and encouragement from our team.

Clean the World provides these kits globally to those in low-income and impoverished areas, granting a little dignity to those in need. Their kits also minimize the spread of disease. In the wake of Harvey, Clean the World has refocused all of their efforts to assembling and delivering kits to Houston and its surrounding areas. Although it seems like a drop in the bucket, DTS is thrilled to be able to help in some small way.

Completed Clean the World Hygiene Kits

“We’ve been in their shoes before,” says Cynthia Novoa, CFO at DTS. “It breaks my heart to know these people have lost everything. This is our first time working with Clean the World – we’re hoping to have them back for more events on a regular basis. We are fortunate enough to be on the giving end this time, and we just want to help.”

Clean the World rep Marcus Thomas arrived at our office with the supplies around 8:30 am and DTS staff jumped right in to help set up the assembly stations. While preparing the conference room for volunteer kit builders, Marcus explained the company history and how Clean the World came to exist fewer than 10 years ago.

Partnering with domestic hotel chains, the organization collects discarded soaps, shampoos and conditioners. Soaps are melted down, sanitized and reformed into new 3-ounce bars. Shampoo and conditioner bottles are sanitized and refilled. A new toothbrush, toothpaste, razor and washcloth rounded out each hygiene kit going to Houston.

These efforts have a global impact on our environment and the millions of wasted products that would otherwise be discarded in landfills here in the US. Far beyond that, these kits are distributed worldwide to impoverished areas, homeless shelters and victims of natural disasters. Once all of the kits were complete, they were taken directly to the airport and loaded onto a plane bound for Houston.

This week Florida finds itself, once again, in the path of a major hurricane as Category 5 Irma barrels toward our coastline. Storm preparations are already well underway as we brace for potential impact over the weekend. All we can hope is that our volunteer efforts to help Houston have brought a level of awareness to our own state to be safe and prepared. Clean the World will continue their assistance to Texas, until the organization is needed elsewhere.

If you would like to donate, volunteer or learn more about Clean the World, please visit: https://cleantheworld.org/
Data Transfer Solutions, LLC headquarters office is located in Avalon Park (Orlando, Florida). Services range from right-of-way data collection and pavement analysis to our enterprise asset management software solution, VUEWorks®, which manages and maintains the full lifecycle of any asset or inventory. DTS strives to give back to the community and do our part to help the environment.

If you would like more information about DTS and VUEWorks, please contact:
Kathy Nelson, Marketing Coordinator: knelson@dtsgis.com.

Business intelligence is a hot topic these days and, understandably, those in the transportation sector are clamoring to get a piece of that action; insights into their infrastructure/assets and management practices, return on investments and as a tool to make better decisions across their enterprise.

At DTS, we focus on intelligent asset management. Therefore, it makes sense that we are helping our DOT clients integrate their assets and GIS data with these business intelligence tools.

Business intelligence or “BI” is not new. Tableau® has been on the scene crushing it for well over a decade. Others, like Microsoft and Esri, are or are attempting to make inroads into this line of business. Here is a brief look at Microsoft’s Power BI. I encourage you to check it out as well as Esri’s Insights for ArcGIS. This is a space DTS has and will continue to play in!

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a relative newcomer to the business analytics services arena. It offers a free desktop interface for the beleaguered data analyst tasked with creating sharp looking hard-copy reports that tell stories. Microsoft also offers cloud-based services (SaaS) for self-service analytics (free) and sharing (paid).

In addition, it has recently announced the Power BI Premium service, a capacity-based licensing model, which offers organizations the ability to manage their reports with on-premise Power BI Report Server. Microsoft has made it easy to run with an Azure cloud infrastructure (Azure Active Directory, Azure SQL Database, etc.) or leverage on-premises resources such as Active Directory, SQL Server, etc.

With Power BI service and Power BI Premium, developers can embed dashboards and reports in desktop and web applications. This functionality allows organizations to provide access to big data and powerful analytical tools in custom applications.

Power BI does support limited mapping functionality out-of-box with their familiar Bing map visualization component. It supports rendering points based on coordinates or geocoded addresses, and polygons based on common boundaries derived from geocoded location columns such as zip code, city, county and state values. Power BI currently does not support rendering linear data. They do offer an R component that has some mapping capabilities however.

For customers with geospatial data, the glaring lack of support for mapping features using native geometry from the underlying RDBMS is stark. So how is a DOT to represent their assets that include points, lines and polygons? Through custom components. Microsoft has made Power BI extensible meaning developers can create and share components.

ArcGIS Maps For Power BI

If your organization lacks a development team but is using ArcGIS Enterprise, then perhaps Insights for ArcGIS is worth looking into.

Esri has released ArcGIS Maps for Power BI free. While the data available for rendering has the same limitations as the default Bing map (coordinates or geocoded locations), it does offer a much richer visualization experience for the end user.

Supplemental reference layers may be included from AGOL or ArcGIS Server. Designers will appreciate multiple basemap options to choose from and map themes that include heat map and cluster renderers among others. The component also offers several feature selection options:

Point and click for individual features. This is similar to what is available in the default Bing map

Drawing a rectangle to select features contained

Using polygon features from reference layers to select features contained

Overall, Esri has done a very nice job with this component. It is well worth checking out.

DTS, makers of VUEWorks is Rollin’ in to San Antonio in June for the TPWA Annual Conference:Stop by Booth # 319 to say “Hello”!

Scot Gordon, P.E. has over 25 years of extensive expertise in engineering and design in the pavement field.

Through experience, he understands the challenges of paving and how expansive soil impacts a solid design. Identifying these challenges and the various methods of overcoming them will be the focus of Scot’s presentation.

Don’t miss your chance to get the “dirty details” of Pavement Distress & Repair:Friday, June 16th at 2:00pm

Christine is a fresh face in software development. After receiving her degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she dove right into debugging Java code.

It didn’t take long for her to move into the quality assurance realm, which brought her to New Hampshire. Fluent in multiple programming languages and development, Christine brings a strong skill set to the VUEWorks team.

In her spare time, she is an avid reader and enjoys jogging. She is also a Comicon enthusiast and makes her own costumes!